Some files matter more than others. A price list that customers download, a policy your staff are expected to follow, the workbook your quarterly figures come from: when one of those changes, somebody other than the person who changed it usually wants to look before the world sees it.
Publishing approval does exactly that. Turn it on for a storage area and every saved change to a spreadsheet or document there goes to named approvers before it’s published. People with write access carry on working with the latest version as normal, and everyone else (colleagues with read-only access, and anyone opening a shared link) keeps seeing the last approved version until the new one is signed off.
Nobody is ever blocked from saving. Foldr governs what readers see, not what authors can do, and that distinction is worth a moment: file locks and check-outs stop work from happening, whereas publishing approval lets the work happen and holds the audience steady until it’s approved.
What you’ll need
Publishing approval is part of Reviews and Approvals, so it needs an Enterprise licence. It works on storage areas that keep a version for every save (your Foldr’s own storage does this out of the box). Areas whose version history comes from scheduled snapshots instead, such as Windows file servers with Previous Versions, aren’t eligible; the setting explains this in place.
Turning it on
- In Foldr Settings, open the storage area and find Publishing approval.
- Switch on Changes require approval before publishing.
- Add one or more approvers: individual people or groups.
That’s it. From the next save onwards, changes to spreadsheets (xlsx and xlsm), Word documents (docx) and PDFs in that area follow the approval flow. One rule you don’t have to configure: the person who made a change can never approve their own change, even if they’re in the approver list.
What approvers see
Each save raises one approval request, and the request shows the actual changes, not just “a file changed”:
- For a workbook: which cells changed, from what to what, including formula edits.
- For a document: which paragraphs changed, shown against the nearest section heading, plus formatting changes that alter meaning (a newly bolded clause, struck-through text) and any tracked changes with their author.
If the same file is saved again while a request is waiting, the request updates to the newest change, so approvers always judge the latest version and never sign off something stale.
Approve, and the new version is published: links and read-only colleagues see it immediately. Decline, and the previously approved version stays published; the author can revise and save again, which raises a fresh request.
The change history
Every save on an eligible area is recorded whether or not approval is switched on, and you’ll find the history in the Versions panel on the file: each version with who saved it and a summary you can expand into the full list of changes. The history follows the file through renames and moves, and it stays available even after the file is deleted, which is precisely when an auditor tends to ask about it.
A few honest edge cases, because you’ll meet them eventually:
- The very first version of a brand-new file publishes immediately; there’s no earlier version to compare against or to hold readers on. Approval governs changes.
- A save that changes formatting or file properties but no content is still gated; the request says “content unchanged” rather than pretending nothing happened.
- A file whose contents can’t be compared (a scanned, image-only PDF is the usual culprit) is still gated too. The request says the changes couldn’t be determined and the approver should look at the file itself. We’d rather admit that than guess.
- Restoring an old version counts as a save like any other, so on a governed area it goes through approval rather than around it.
What it doesn’t cover (yet)
While a change is waiting, the file’s preview image is withheld from people who can’t see the draft; they get the file icon instead. Search results and folder downloads, however, are built from the latest version, so a determined reader with search access could see fragments of an unapproved change there. If that matters for your use of it, keep governed files in areas your general population can’t search. We’re tightening this in a future release.
Why not just use tracked changes?
Tracked changes in Word is a courtesy between authors: it records edits inside the file, and whoever holds the file can accept, reject or simply clear the lot. Publishing approval is a control: the record of what changed lives in Foldr, outside the file, where the author can’t rewrite it, and the decision about what readers see belongs to the approver, not the editor. The two work happily together; if a document carries tracked changes, the approval request shows them, along with who made them.